alonetone launched in January 2008. As of 2015 it hosts over 58,000 tracks from 4500 musicians. We have delivered over 4.5 million mp3s to real listeners (not google and spambots, we are strict about excluding em!)

To create and run the best online home a musician could want to have. To provide them with the tools they need to reach listeners and network with other artists — without the stank of commercialism, startup flava, ads, etc.

New Features must prove themselves and obey the above principles — not just be built because it sounds cool or would be fun to hack on. We have said "no" to many "intuitive" or "easy" features like threaded comment replies because they would compromise or distract from the above goals.

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For more info on alonetone, visit [the alonetone faq](http://alonetone.com/about)

This is very easy. Already implemented on Ramen Music. Essentially just is a having a controller generate a text file of filenames that nginx interrupts and uses to construct a zip that's sent back to the client.

It's high time. We're small fries perhaps (40k tracks) but we lack any categorization outside of playlists and users. The community has decided NO GENRES and after a bunch of discussion, we've decided going with tags (chosen by the uploader) is likely best. However, problems ensue, including:

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1) If it's a free for all, won't it just be like genres, but messy?

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2) Should the tags be moderated and exclude genres?

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3) What to do about tagging all the old music, should moderators be able to adjust and add tags for the lazy users/old tracks?

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4) Should there be a maximum enforced for UI purposes?

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This is more than just programming, it's ultimately a UI issue. We can look to Ramen's tag implementation (4-5 maximum, taking up 1-2 lines) for inspiration, but it's very easy to do this wrong.

We need to expose a bit more info to the admins/mods. We want to see how signups/assets/comments are trending to help us catch anything strange or cool. But we also just want to know some useful stuff.

We get trouble with downloading bots, spambots. We have manually hardcoded IPs in the source, specefically to prevent downloading mp3 and wasting our bandwidth. We need to create a UI so this can be managed by a non-techie moderator. Also, we need to provide logged in users with a "report" action on their listens if they notice sketchy behavior, so it can go upstream to the mods.

Please understand that alonetone is open-source as an educational tool, to encourage collaboration, and for transparency. It is not intended as a white-label solution. If you are serious about getting a copy in production, it's going to take lots of work (like 40+ hours) since it's not intended for that purpose.